Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)

About the role

Engineering Location: Menlo Park

What You'll Do

• Own new hardware evaluation and enablement. Lead evaluation of new AWS, Azure, and GCP instance types (e.g., AWS Graviton, AMD Turin, Azure ARM/Cobalt, GCP Axion) by building representative benchmark and evaluation solutions.
• Set performance strategy and architecture. Shape the team's technical roadmap, set direction on measurement methodology, and translate benchmark results into concrete rollout and adoption recommendations.
• Lead cross-functional and CSP partnerships. Work across engineering (i.e. Warehouse, Capacity, and other core platform teams) and Finance along with AWS, Azure, GCP to qualify new hardware and influence future cloud-instance designs.
• Characterize hardware performance at a deep level. Analyze CPU microarchitecture (e.g., memory bandwidth, PMU counters, I/O behavior) to identify workload-specific bottlenecks and drive resolution.
• Develop price/performance model to support new hardware transitions.
• Automate day-zero hardware readiness. Build automated performance-validation workflows and per-provider/per-instance scorecards so Snowflake can qualify and price new silicon at or near cloud-provider GA.
• Grow the performance engineering discipline. Mentor engineers, build out benchmarking capability, and drive company-wide performance education (e.g., a recurring Performance Tech Talk series).

Our ideal candidate will have

• 12+ years of experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with a track record of principal-level technical leadership.
• Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure performance across at least one major CSP (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including instance types, pricing models, and capacity constraints.
• Strong grounding in hardware/systems fundamentals: CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems, and use of profiling tools (PMU counters, etc.) to root-cause performance bottlenecks.
• Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems (e.g., TPC-DS-style workloads) and turning benchmark output into actionable optimization strategies and pricing/rollout decisions.
• Ability to build quantitative models connecting technical performance metrics to business outcomes (pricing multipliers, cost-per-query).
• A track record of leading cross-functional, cross-company initiatives - comfortable being the primary technical point of contact with external hardware and cloud partners (CSPs, silicon vendors).
• Bias toward automation: builds scorecards, dashboards, and validation pipelines rather than relying on one-off analysis.

Nice to Have

• Experience with data warehouse / distributed database performance characteristics.
• Direct experience partnering with cloud providers or silicon vendors on early-access hardware programs.
• Experience building hardware-emulation systems.

Additional information

Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

How do you want to make your impact?